Spent 6 hours last night in research mode, set on answering a critical question that all SaaS companies face near the beginning of their product, what is The Ideal Startup Stack?

I went to bed 🛌 after 3 am, yet had to wake up at 8 am for tech support at my day job. Balancing my family’s major household income (my salary) with spending time with the family and finding time to do my own startup ventures on the side, is a near impossible endeavor to do successfully. I want to do startups, but I also want to have a family.

Since both are demanding of my time, I see their dot product is less than I’d hoped. I wonder if I can align the family on a startup idea so we can blend family time with startup time so the dot product is maximized, in other words hit 2 birds with 1 stone.

However, since I also manage a 3rd time consuming activity that is most important for our personal finances, I often find myself struggling to keep things afloat. I’m always running a time deficit on one of the aspects because there simply is not enough time in the day. With a little one on the way, I can imagine the debt will eventually bankrupt me.

With activities increasing their competition for my time (let’s not even consider a promotion at the day job), I feel that time makes my desired path mutually exclusive from my current path.

I took a peaceful job at a startup with great people (lack of fully defined product) and have worked as I had in the early days of my last startup. The culture is amazing and the working from home flexibility is a huge attractor.

Problem is, I don’t want to work hard for someone else. I want to work hard for myself. I operate at 60% capacity for others.

I have equity at said promising company, but I value my time more than the equity. I’ve experienced enough things where I now recognize that time is the most precious of resources. It is difficult for me to put in the hours that would translate to startup success when my share is much lower than is motivational to me.

There is an apathy that I feel setting in. The only way I can see to escape it is if I make it a point to work on things where I learn what I need to learn in order to be a potent technical founder. If I cannot align my family on my startup ideas, then I must find a way to align my ideas with the challenges faced at work. It appears to be the only non-zero dot product of passion.

What I fear of me more than before, is that I am going to make a lot more mistakes in the process of making my startup work than sticking to my engineering duties in my current professional position, but I can see myself pursuing a venture more earnestly if it were my own than if it is owned by someone else. Lives have been torn apart by ambition, and my concern is that the road I’m on will end in misery for my family and my sanity as I jeopardize my salary and sacrifice my family time working late nights and on weekends.

My ego is cracked and now is the time to crush it and it scares me. I have an old friend that I realize is not in a position to help but I’ve had high hopes for us for years. I’ve tried to work with him in the past and I always end up feeling that I am doing more than the lion’s share. I need to go out and mess up in the pursuit of starting something new. The interviews, the ideation, the more interviews, the mockups and interaction with early adopters is going to be the bulk of the initial phase of unknown.

There is risk in pursuing a startup when you haven’t “made it happen” before and when others are one foot in with the other firmly in conservative employment. There’s a drag force you feel when you’re an outsider to your own social circle…

Excuses come in as many shapes, flavors, and sizes as there are stars in the galaxy. It’s only natural to not know how to handle all of them. It’s taxing to learn a knew situation, there’s always the chance our internal beliefs will be challenged.

The sad thing is, I see doe-eyed startup founders eager to “make it” pulling all-nighters and pushing hard in a direction they hope leads them to success. As much as I’m fired up seeing this energy, I cannot afford to move in a direction that is not forward anymore, moving smart has eclipsed moving fast. When does not giving up shift from being an admirable trait to being an incurable pathological obsession? Maybe there is an age when you’ve struck out enough times that you’ve gotta throw in the towel.

I feel like an addict, high on working on my startup ideas when the house is asleep. I am awake and full of purpose working on my startup, a growing conviction that this is “me” and that I have to protect that big part of who I am by building a company that can provide for my family so that I can reduce the strain of juggling 3 variables to 2 🤹‍♂️. This is my demon, my Gollum, my precious is that I want to do my startups for a living.